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Monday, November 09, 2009

More than either of the other two local news television stations, News 2 has tended to have a culture war edge to it, especially in the reporting of Jamey Tucker. And we can perennially bet that Tucker will ramp up the theo-con angles (or is than "angels"?) on his reportage the deeper we move into the year-end holiday season.

Tucker is starting early this year with a story on an LED billboard, which is controversial enough with many neighborhoods. However, he is seemingly not interested in the quality-of-life impact of bright, streaming, distracting Vegas-style billboards. Instead he hones in on one particularly innocent message like a duck on a June bug and he wrings his own meaning from it.

As I said, Tucker's biased reporting is typical of his history of covering faith-based issues. His comment that the sign advertises the belief that there is no God seems to be designed to incite drama where there may not be any. His bias is probably going to end up as an unintentional fundraising catalyst for a project that otherwise would have had less.

UPDATE: I just found out that Jamey Tucker has a ministry outside of his work at WKRN. There is nothing wrong with having a moonlighting ministry. There is something wrong if Tucker allows that ministry to bias his journalism. And I see strong consistencies between the slant of spin against WKRN report subjects who are not evangelical, and his overtly evangelical ministry reportage like this:

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About Me

Been in urban North Nashville for over a decade. Before that I lived in East Nashville. I also lived in near West Nashville for a time. In the past I called Louisville (KY) and Dallas-Fort Worth (TX) home.